The Day the Musical Didn’t Die
Many insist the Hollywood movie musical died in the 1950s with the collapse of the studio system and the petering out of Arthur Freed’s legendary productions at MGM. But musicals never truly went away, they just got stale in the leering shadow of rock ‘n’ roll. Limping into the 1970s, the genre got a swift kick by a ragged bunch of young punks, influenced in equal measure by Hollywood and Europe. Now the musical was tangled up with rock, its forms and traditions splintered and reassembled. This amorphous rejuvenation is on full display in Hollywood Musicals of the 1970s & ’80s, Part 1: The 1970s at Anthology Film Archives, running June 17–26, focusing on the best the decade has to offer.
The series opens with Frank Zappa’s truly bizarre 1971 200 Motels (June 17). A long-form joke stretched to its limits, the film is a spinning wheel of teenage humor, absurd comic sketches and performances by the Mothers of Invention, all layered with unhealthy doses of primitive video effects. The whole thing is loose and barely contained, a little indulgent and narcissistic—maybe the first real rock musical. At first, All That Jazz (June 19), made at the opposite end of the decade, doesn’t seem very rock-n-roll. Director Bob Fosse’s stylized and selfreflexive account of the life and death of a musical director—a thinly-veiled therapy session—is overly ambitious and reckless. But it’s also deeply moving and funny as hell, taking more risks than it has any right to.
Other directors looked forward, or at least all around them. Rock ‘n’ roll was here to stay, so there was no point in avoiding the subject any longer. Brian De Palma took a step to the side of his usual Hitchcock-obsessed thrillers to helm Phantom of the Paradise (June 17), which embraces nostalgia-drenched pop and rock to pump new life into The Phantom of the Opera. Filled with gags, wall to wall music, sex, violence and eye-popping visuals, it’s a travesty this hasn’t achieved midnight movie status: It almost begs for audience participation, with the sights and sounds jumping off the screen. Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (June 19) moves on the same currents of energy, but at a much smaller scale. Like Phantom, the Ramonescentered teensploitation is self-aware, a joke we’re all in on. Produced by Roger Corman, it’s the film in the series that looks and feels the way it sounds: cheap, funny and crude, moving along in a quick blast like a great punk song.
It wasn’t necessary for every musical of the decade to wear its rebelliousness on its sleeve. In New York, New York (June 18), Martin Scorsese erects an art deco monument around a dark, painful relationship drama about a saxophone player and a nightclub singer.
A fitting end to the series, Pennies from Heaven (June 20) is the Depression-set musical written by Dennis Potter from his own BBC series and starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. The use of lip-synching to old recordings manages to distance the audience, so that you listen to the songs, look at the images and notice the contradictions. It’s escapist entertainment about the dangers of escapist entertainment. The panorama of references and old styles has a built-in self critique which seems obvious for any genre on the verge of exhaustion. It also indicates new approaches for the coming decade and beyond, how to deal with the past while pointing toward the future